While there is no universally-accepted, all-encompassing definition of a smart city, it is safe to say it’s an urban area that incorporates technology to use and manages its assets efficiently and provides its citizens with a sustainable future. And in this environmentally-conscious future, electric vehicles (EV) are poised to play a crucial role in decreasing our reliance on fossil fuels.
No wonder then that the EV market today is witnessing an explosive growth. As per McKinsey’s Electric Vehicle Index, more than 1 million new EVs were added to the roads globally in 2017. And EV producers could almost quadruple that achievement by 2020, moving 4.5 million units or around 5% of the overall global light-vehicle market.
But this momentum of electric vehicle proliferation can only be sustained if users know that they have a hassle-free driving experience in front of them. You cannot have an EV buyer worry about where they are going to find the next charging station. And as such, the onus falls on forward-looking cities to make sure that they have a sufficient EV charging infrastructure in place.
According to a 2017 report by the US Department of Energy, the United States will require around 600,000 non-residential EV charging stations to meet the demand of a projected 15 million on-road EVs by 2030. Today, there are only 18,750 public EV charging stations in the US. Clearly, there is a huge gap that needs to be met in little over a decade, and smart cities will be expected to take the lead here.
Just like cities today have gasoline stations within a short driving distance, the cities of the future will need to implement a well-planned grid of EV charging stations throughout their geographies. The most important criteria here would be to make sure that the distance between any two charging stations must be less than the range of the popular EVs today.
Post time: Feb-22-2022